


the purge

by makeashadow_ao3



Series: It's a Pretty Fixation [2]
Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M, for all these ideas that want to be whole ass fics, i don't have the tiiiiime, i've also never seen a second of any of the purge movies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-25
Updated: 2018-11-14
Packaged: 2019-08-07 12:15:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16408319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/makeashadow_ao3/pseuds/makeashadow_ao3
Summary: When Malachai Parker walks into the office building of Gemini Corp in Portland, Oregon, his nose is glued to his phone and he barely notices the woman in the elevator. He wouldn’t immediately recognize her and even if he did, he has more pressing concerns. It’s the morning of March 21 and the start of the Purge is less than twelve hours away.





	1. Chapter 1

**Boo-Kai 2k18**  
Day 2: _Horror Movies_

_the purge_

Bonnie was sixteen when her family’s multinational corporation folded. Founded by her grandparents, a secretary for the electric company and an engineer, Bennett Enterprises expanded from its start as a telecommunications firm to a conglomerate with hands in every industry imaginable. Tech, finance, defense, medicine, transportation. You name it, the Bennetts did it.

Sheila Bennett controlled everything from the home office in Manhattan, affording Bonnie a high class private school education, while Abby Bennett handled the beauty and lifestyle sector in Atlanta and the son-in-law Rudy Hopkins was stationed in their London satellite office. Cousin Lucy headed the entertainment side of things in both Los Angeles and China, and when Bonnie got to her senior year she was going to spend her summers interning with the publishing imprint in Seattle.

Through no fault of its own, the company went belly up before Bonnie had the chance to step foot on the pacific northwest peninsula. The rumors were numerous. The economy tanked. They lost their contract with the US government, which began to unravel the footholds of the other organizations. While branded as a matriarchal company, Sheila just couldn’t run the business the same after the death of their patriarch. A scandal between Bonnie’s parents, estranged and rarely at the same boardroom table let along dinner table, found the front pages of every tabloid and gossip site.

The real culprit, though, was Gemini Corp. Equally as successful in the same fields with unconfirmed ties with criminal families, the company founded by Joshua Parker played every trick in the book. It was corporate sabotage no one could prove. Because of the Parkers, the silver spoon Bonnie was born with was ripped out of her mouth and took a few teeth with it.

Bennett Enterprises closed its doors the summer before Bonnie’s senior year of high school, and she and her family packed up and moved back to the small Virginian town they came from. In the following years, Bonnie adopted her father’s surname Hopkins, quietly attended Brown University, and waited for her chance.

More than a decade later, Joshua Parker silently battles stomach cancer and turns the company and all its interests over to his eldest son. When Malachai Parker walks into the office building of Gemini Corp in Portland, Oregon, his nose is glued to his phone and he barely notices the woman in the elevator. He wouldn’t immediately recognize her and even if he did, he has more pressing concerns. It’s the morning of March 21 and the start of the Purge is less than twelve hours away.

_x_

Malachai Parker wakes to the sight of a woman in a red dress perched on the arm of the couch. He starts. The sun is already setting and he can hear the explosions from the street below. Glass shattering and people rioting. The carnage began and he slept through it.

He remembers canceling his four o’clock meeting with the company’s attorney. He wanted to leave the office early enough to beat the traffic home. Had the Purge existed in his younger days, he would’ve been out in the street with goddamn bells on, but now… He has the business and people who count on him to stay alive.

“Who…are you?” His mouth and throat are dry, so he has to swallow a few times to create saliva.

The woman’s back is to him, her attention out the window at the outside world. Her dress, a second skin, hugs her body in a way that says it’s loathe to be shed. Her lower back and down are wrapped in tight cotton. Spandex? Something stretchy, very form fitting. Like the women Kai watches in clubs, not business casual at all. With the exception of two skinny overlapping straps, her back is bare. Her raven hair snakes over her shoulder like a curtain.

Maybe she’s an escort. Anything is legal for the next twelve hours after all.

“This place is a fortress. Why am I not surprised? Your family learns from the mistakes of others. Like my family.” She stands, her heels clacking against the cold tile as she strides to the window. Two of the walls are floor-to-ceiling glass, the same bulletproof material they use on police cars.

He goes to sit up but his head spins, his vision whirling the penthouse office on its axis. He only manages to prop himself up on his elbows. “What are you doing in my office?”

“Riding out the Purge. With you, Kai.”

He frowns. No one calls him that. It’s either Malachai or Mal or Mister Parker. No one’s called him Kai since…high school. “Bonnie?”

“I like what you’ve done with the place. Your security detail… My father would’ve been very impressed.”

“What are- Why are you here?”

She finally turns to face him, virulent eyes cutting from across the room. “I thought you’d be happy to see me.”

“It’s been a while.”

“Twelve years,” she breezily offers. “We lost touch. I thought we were friends. Figured after everything, we’d at least be penpals.”

“What are you doing here?”

Her perfectly maintained eyebrows knit together. “I told you. I’m here to ride out the Purge. Are you feeling okay? You were sleeping pretty hard. You even missed your car at five, but Nora’s quick. She switched to Protocol Two.”

While she talks, he tries harder to push himself upright but his body feels like lead. His mind is catching up, though. Protocol Two: lockdown of the entire building. Only essential personnel. “Where is she? Where’s Nora?”

She holds up her hands in surrender and steps in his direction. “She’s fine. Just taking a little siesta.”

“You drugged us?” He didn’t taste it when he downed the mid-day coffee his assistant had brought him, but the stale sodium on his dry tongue tips him off. No way he’d fall asleep on the job. Not today. Not willingly.

Bonnie stops at the couch and tilts her head to the side. “No, just you. Nora went down easier if you catch my drift.”

Kai doesn’t until he does. His assistant’s life is her own, it’s none of his business as long as she does her job well, but she did take some personal time off a few months back when her girlfriend Mary-Louise dumped her. But Bonnie looking like she does right now… Anyone would be on their knees.

“What do you want?”

“To talk.”

“Phones exist. So do emails.”

Her grimace returns. Lean arms wrap around her middle, accentuating her cleavage and a neckline that isn’t doing its job - unless its job is to tumble loosely away from the body. “You’re a hard man to get a hold of, Mister Parker. No one cares if we attended the same prestigious private school in New York or that I went to an Ivy, too. You are the unreachable man.”

“Then how…” Kai’s having trouble piecing the world together, and that excites Bonnie. Emerald eyes blaze in the darkening room.

“How’d I end up here? In your office? And not one security guard in sight? Let me ask you this - you employ, what, ex-cops? Military vets? Guys from the mob or the cartel who want to walk the straight and narrow?”

“I don’t do the hiring. I wouldn’t know.”

Her canted jaw breaks into a huge smile. “I know.”

_x_

She tosses her legs atop his large wooden desk and crosses her ankles, the red bottoms of her too expensive black heels on display for Kai’s viewing pleasure. Whatever dosage she gave him — she really can’t remember and couldn’t replicate it if she tried; she’d eyeballed it — took him down. Even as he came to, he couldn’t gain control of his limbs which gave her ample time to tie him up. That was part of the fun, him being conscious all the while. But now, in the vice grip of metal chains and bucking wildly against his confines, well, she’s getting bored.

Night has fallen, the overcast sky murky with smoke, and the only light in the room comes from a lamp on his desk. “Ease up, will ya? I know how much you bench but that won’t help you get out of those chains. At this point, you’re embarrassing yourself. I’m embarrassed for you.”

They’d chatted idly while she tied him up. Well, she chatted. He had no choice but to listen. She filled him in on her life. How no school in Mystic Falls, Virginia was good enough to take her after her family fled New York, so she home-schooled herself and got into Brown for undergrad and then Columbia for her MBA. Crouching, she wound metal around his ankles. “My parents finally bit the bullet and got that divorce. Then my father bit the bullet for real.”

She mimed two fingers between her top and bottom rows of teeth, her thumb the trigger. As her thumb bent back like the hammer of a gun, she let out a sound effect. “ _Cah_!” Her head jerked for emphasis.

When she stood to her full height, she exhaled. “You smell good. What’s that, CK One?”

He thrashes against his chains once more. “Just tell me what you want. Money? Cars? What? Tell me and it’s yours.”

She twirls a pen between nimble fingers. “Don’t promise me things before you’ve heard my proposal.”

“Which is what?” he spits. He’s become impatient with her. His guards haven’t once come to break the door down. Nora could be dead and hogtied in the coat closet for all he knows. There’s no way Protocol Two would be active without hourly check-ins. But his cell phone nor his desk phone have rang once. Someone could strap a bomb to the side of the skyscraper and no one would know to look for him in the rubble.

Bonnie gets up and goes over to him. Leaning forward, her loose neckline gives way to the lacy brassiere cupping her breasts. He gulps back the long buried lust. “Eyes up here, Pervy Parker.”

He obeys, their attention on each other and only them. There’s a hard shell over the green eyes he’d once known so well. They were on the same swim team in school. The best in their divisions in the entire state. Her teenage body was slimmer, curves now padding her sharp joints. Under the blanket of self-preservation, he wonders how soft she feels now.

“You, Malachai Parker, are going to help me.”

“With what?”

“What else? Rebuilding my family’s business.”

He makes a face. “And why, Bonnie _Hopkins_ , would I do that?”

She flinches at his usage of her father’s name. That means he’s been keeping tabs on her. Or he had at one point. If he had any recent interest in her at all, her name would’ve been flagged when the temp agency contracted her to fill in for an administrative assistant for Gemini Corp’s finance department just down the hall from Kai’s office.

She leans closer, her painted lips at his ear. “Because we have, mm, eleven hours left of our time together and by the time seven am comes you’re going to be begging. The only thing that’ll taste sweeter than death is you getting the chance to help me.”

“You forget,” he chuckles. “I’ve already tasted you.”

Her grin widens at the memory. Two teenagers fumbling with their clothes under hotel sheets the night of an away swim meet. She pulls back just so their faces are breaths from each other. Perspiration beads on his forehead and his stormy grey eyes with blown pupils in the low light will make this night memorable for her in more ways than one.

“True.” She lets her eyes dip to his lips, open and panting. “But I’ve learned some new tricks since then.”

The pen clutched in her fist then jams into the sinewy muscle of his upper thigh.


	2. Chapter 2

2.

The temp agency warned her. This job really was “temporary”. The company has a very thorough and drawn-out vetting process for prospective employees, but one of their finance clerks was out on maternity leave and they needed someone to keep their numbers straight as they neared the end of the fiscal year. Ten weeks max but it could be shorter and end without notice. She promised she was fine with that.

She didn’t need long anyway.

Kai cries out, the pen in his thigh setting his nerves on fire. They say getting stabbed feels like being punched, but with any twitch or movement comes the glaring reminder there is a two hundred dollar fountain pen sticking out of his leg. Struggling to breathe evenly, he grits his teeth. Grey eyes well up and spittle escapes his clenched teeth. She swipes the pad of her thumb across his bottom lip and pops it in her mouth, tongue rolling. It’s like that one scene in Romeo and Juliet. “Surely some poison doth hang on them” or some shit like that. She faintly tastes that roofied caramel latte in his saliva.

“Here’s how this works. You and I will spend eleven wonderful, uninterrupted hours alone together. And by daybreak, when the Purge is over, we’re really going to get to work.”

His hand struggles against his chains, arms strapped down just out of reach of the foreign object. “You don’t have to do this. Bonnie. I’ll help you. I promise.”

She squints, straightens up, and laughs. It’s a humored bark which reverberates off the marble floor and walls. “Of course you do! You’re under duress. _Duh_!”

“No, really, Bon.”

A hum buzzes her teeth at the old nickname. The kids in New York, children of titans, weren’t exactly chummy with Bonnie. Her family was legend while also being seen as an aberration to Wall Street. She congregated in hallways with the few other girls of color there, daughters of politicians and international diplomats. But Kai…

They were as close as it got for future competitors in academia and in life. Watched each other grow through their awkward stages when their limbs were too gangly and their noses too big for their faces. She didn’t lightly decide to lose her virginity to him. To this day, she doesn’t regret it either. In a way, they’re bound.

She grips the tight fabric of her dress, bunches the long skirt in her hands, and hikes it up at an agonizingly slow pace. He gets a peek of black lace panties before she straddles his knees and sinks her weight down on his legs. He winces as her thigh brushes the offending pen and all but sees stars when she dips her hand between them and firmly grabs it. In one quick motion, she yanks it out and lets it clatter to the floor. His forehead falls onto her shoulder from the pain and relief.

“There, there,” she shushes his whimpers. “Hey. Remember sophomore year? The trip our class took over holiday break?”

Sweden, he wants to supply, but his mouth fails him. All he can do is let his head hang and relish the sensation of her nails scratching his scalp to distract from the throbbing of his bleeding thigh and his growing erection.

“This is like that.”

“You chained me up and stabbed me in tenth grade? Must’ve slipped my mind.”

“No, Kai,” she sighs. “Think of this as Stockholm. You’re my hostage and by the end of this, you’ll be on my side because you want to be.”

He lifts his head and while her eyes search his face for acquiescence, his gaze drops to her mouth. Matte red lacquer covers her plump lips. The Bonnie he knew had never worn an ounce of makeup or met a pair of tweezer. Hell, she had braces freshman and sophomore year. She was never an ugly duckling but somehow pales in comparison to this version of herself. A woman who commands attention.

She clocks his attention falling to her lips and she smirks. “Aw, don’t give in so soon. The party’s just starting.”

His eyes flash up to her and he nods. “You’re right.” Then he jerks forward and his forehead collides with her nose. She tips backwards off his lap and slips to the floor, her hand going to her face. A bloody palm is what she finds when she pulls it away.

She sucks her teeth and plasters on a cheshire grin. “There he is.”

_x_

Kai’s office is the master suite. The largest square footage of any room in the building with a private bathroom and emergency staircase hidden behind the bookshelf. Yes, he has a sliding bookcase to disguise an escape route. That’s either paranoid as fuck or just a way for his father to blow money he didn’t know how else to spend. Bonnie tells him as much.

After returning from the bathroom with a wet rag stained with blood and snot held to her nose, she accidentally finds the lever that trips the mechanism. It’s not a book or a paperweight like in the movies. Just an invisible latch fashioned into the mahogany finish she wouldn’t have seen without close inspection.

The bleeding subsides, so she pats the rag to her nose. “It’s not broken, thanks for asking. Just bruised to all hell. God, you can’t even break my nose properly. Is that normal or did I basically overdose you?”

“Dunno. Let’s try for a repeat,” he goads.

She wags her finger and goes back to his desk. Setting the rag down, she sifts through her black winter coat hung over his cushy office chair. Upon finding whatever she was looking for, she fists it and the rag, and rounds the desk. There’s a pair of scissors sticking from a cup and she grabs it, twirls it around her finger. “Malachai, I spy with my wittle eye something that’s...black.”

“Your soul?”

“Funny. If you’d said my skin, that would’ve just been cheap. But neither. It’s your pants. I’m going to have to cut you out of them. We’ve got to stitch up that wound before it gets infected.”

“Do you have any idea how much this suit costs?”

She puts the scissors, blades pointed at his adam’s apple, under his chin and lifts his face up to hers. “Does it look like I care about your suit?”

Crouching again, she lays the rag and mysterious object in her hand flat on the floor. An emergency stitch kit with varying colors of thread. He rolls his eyes. It looks exactly like the kind one would buy at the drugstore. If he does get an infection, it could just as easily come from that.

Her hands are steady as she grasps his pant leg and inserts the scissors into the hole where she stabbed him. Careful not to graze the wound, she cuts laterally over one side of his thigh and then in the opposite direction. There’s a strip she can’t get to without lifting his leg, and she frowns at the obstacle. Then, her features smooth into a stoic mask and she drops the scissors. Gripping the bottom hem of the pant leg, she yanks and the material gives a satisfying _riiiiiip_ as it pulls loose.

“ _Fuck!_ ”

Her eyebrows go up. “What?”

Biting back the pain on his jostled injury, he purses his lips. “Just stitch it up.”

“Bossy,” she mumbles, snatching up the rag. He should be worried she’s wiping his open wound with a cloth soaked in her own blood, but they made a pact when they were children. Pricked their fingers and smushed them together. He’s more concerned with her handiwork. She was a horrible Home-Ec student. Couldn’t sew an apron to save her life.

“So,” she starts as she sticks pink thread through the eye of the tiny needle. “How’s life?”

His head falls back, but he’ll humor the madwoman. “Just peachy.”

“How’s your father?”

His jaw tightens. Joshua Parker is a topic of contention. He chose Kai to take over the business but not without its drawbacks. Even with stomach cancer, he’s trying to run the company from a hospital bed. Kai would smother him with a pillow if he could get away with it. Huh. If Bonnie hadn’t gotten to him first, who’s to say he wouldn't have made a pit stop on his way home?

“He’s alive.”

“Not for long.”

Kai glares down at her. She makes a _duh_ face. “From the cancer. Why would I waste precious Purge time on a dying man? That’s no fun.”

Her fingers pinch his split skin and threads in the needle. Kai sucks in air through clenched teeth. “He deserves a slow death. Fate saw to that.”

Deep down, he agrees with her. But on the surface, no one talks bad about his father and gets away with it. “Where was fate when your family lost their company?”

That causes her to pause. She keeps her attention on the needle in her fingers sticky with blood. “Where I stabbed you… It’s a flesh wound. It’ll heal just fine. I didn’t hit any major nerves. You won’t even have a limp.” Her pinky finger taps his inner thigh and he flinches from the slight touch. “Your femoral artery is right here. You would’ve bled out in moments.

“There’s calculation and then there’s faith. Your father coming after my family was calculated. This wound was calculated. His stomach cancer...well, that’s just grace.”

“If I didn’t know you were soulless, I’d think you believed in something.”

She goes back to sewing. “I do. I believe in balance. Regression to the mean. It’s a statistical term. Extremes tend toward the average upon further measurements. Everything moves in the direction of stability, a statis. Like the human body. Right now, you’ve lost a bit of blood. Not a lot, but enough that your body is trying to conserve energy. Your adrenaline was pumping, but now that you’re coming down off its high, your body is figuring out how to preserve itself. That’s just nature.”

“I hate the man as much as the next guy, but…” He shakes it head. “I wouldn’t call the cancer a sign of grace.”

“You should. If he hadn’t gotten sick… Let’s just say I would’ve made his last moments a goddamn nightmare.”

He clears his throat. The woman is downright chilling. Dark. So unlike the girl he grew up with. “Shame you left school before senior year. You’d’ve made a fair salutatorian to my valedictorian.”

The corner of her mouth ticks up. “Please. We both know I would’ve kicked your ass.” She finishes stitching, knots the thread before biting it loose, and then grins up at Kai. “There. One of your problems solved.”

“One of?”

Eyes obviously on his crotch, she stands. “We can handle that one a little later.”

His hand juts out and snatches her wrist. “Don’t even think about it,” he says, ignoring how his cock swells. They stare each other down until he finally lets her go and she picks up her tools.

“I told you. Come morning, you’re going to want this.” By _this_ , perhaps she meant to say “me” but wouldn’t she have just said that? He huffs and glares as she goes back to the bathroom to wash her hands of all the blood.

_x_

She’s uncharacteristically quiet.

Her heels lay abandoned by the desk and he hasn’t seen her in...well, he can’t see the clock on the wall from here nor can he twist the face of his wristwatch around. But it’s been a while. She went over to the window some time ago leaving Kai to his thoughts.

“What do you see?” he throws over his shoulder. He doesn’t get an immediate response, so he calls out again. “Hey. Bonnie.”

“Shh.”

“What?”

“ _Shh_.”

“What’s the matter?”

“The matter is you shutting up for a second.”

He grinds his teeth. She infuriates him more and more every second. Two can play at that game. “ _Uuugh_!” he groans. “ _Uuuuuuuugh!_ ”

He hears her snarl, her dress swish, and her toes slap against the marble flooring. She grabs a fistful of hair and forcefully pulls his head backwards. Looking up at her upside down face, he notices the way her set jaw cants to the side just so, the flecks of brown that classify her green feline eyes hazel, the freckles littering her high cheekbones. God, if the past twelve years had happened differently…

“I have a sniper on the roof of every neighboring building that can be seen from this room. If I don’t signal their team leader every hour on the hour, this skyscraper goes ka-boom. So when I say _shh,_ for both our sakes, shut the fuck up.”

She gracelessly lets go, and he rolls his aching neck. The woman is stronger than he gives her credit, but in a fair fight he’d best her every time. “Why not just kill me?”

Rounding on him, she licks her taut lips in frustration and idly scratches at her scalp. “If I kill you, then how are you going to help me? I need you alive to gain access to all the accounts and contracts we lost, all the connections your father stole from us. I can’t very well do that if you’re a corpse. Like, what kind of person needs that explained to them?”

Kai has to admit this is new. No one talks to him this way. Nora teases now and then, but she knows one wrong word and she’s out on her ass. Most people are intimidated by the name, the money, the power. They’re enticed by it, too, but they tread with a healthy sense of caution. Who would’ve thought little Bonnie Bennett had the balls?

But he’s getting under her skin as well. What’s the point in playing sweet, obedient hostage if she’s still going to discard him when she’s done? He can have some fun, too.

“I have a new problem.”

“Which would be?” she wonders, boredom coloring her tone.

“I have to use the restroom.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> two weeks later and i’m staring at my document thinking “wtf were you thinking?” as much as i love me an unhinged kai parker, an indulgently dark bonnie is too good to not have fun with.

**Author's Note:**

> day 2 and i swear i have mentally accessed another realm. who the hell do i think am i?


End file.
